48 national geographic • September 2013
metropolitan region urgently needs a master plan
to ensure that future construction will at least not
exacerbate the hazards from rising seas.
“The problem is we’re still building the city of
the past,” says Jacob. “ The people of the 1880s
couldn’t build a city for the year 2000—of course
not. And we cannot build a year-2100 city now.
But we should not build a city now that we know
will not function in 2100. There are opportuni-
ties to renew our infrastructure. It’s not all bad
news. We just have to grasp those opportunities.”
Will New York grasp them after Bloomberg
leaves office at the end of this year? And can a
single storm change not just a city’s but a nation’s
policy? It has happened before. The Netherlands
had its own stormy reckoning 60 years ago, and
it transformed the country.
The storm roared in from the North Sea on
the night of January 31, 1953. Ria Geluk was six
years old at the time and living where she lives
today, on the island of Schouwen Duiveland in
the southern province of Zeeland. She remem-
bers a neighbor knocking on the door of her
parents’ farmhouse in the middle of the night to
tell them that the dike had failed. Later that day
the whole family, along with several neighbors
who had spent the night, climbed to the roof,
where they huddled in blankets and heavy coats
in the wind and rain. Geluk’s grandparents lived
just across the road, but water swept into the
village with such force that they were trapped in
their home. They died when it collapsed.
“Our house kept standing,” says Geluk. “ The
next afternoon the tide came again. My father
could see around us what was happening; he
could see houses disappearing. You knew when
a house disappeared, the people were killed. In
the afternoon a fishing boat came to rescue us.”
In 1997 Geluk helped found the Watersnood-
museum—the “flood museum”—on Schouwen
Duiveland. The museum is housed in four con-
crete caissons that engineers used to plug dikes
in 1953. The disaster killed 1,836 in all, nearly
half in Zeeland, including a baby born on the
night of the storm.
Afterward the Dutch launched an ambitious
of artificial reefs built from stone, rope, and
wood pilings and seeded with oysters and other
shellfish. The reefs would continue to grow as sea
levels rose, helping to buffer storm waves—and
the shellfish, being filter feeders, would also help
clean the harbor. “Twenty-five percent of New
York Harbor used to be oyster beds,” Orff says.
Orff estimates her “oystertecture” vision could
be brought to life at relatively low cost. “It would
be chump change compared with a conventional
barrier. And it wouldn’t be money wasted: Even
if another Sandy never happens, you’d have a
cleaner, restored harbor in a more ecologically
vibrant context and a healthier New York.”
In June, Mayor Michael Bloomberg outlined
can a single storm
change national
policy? it happened
in the netherlands
in 1953, after the
dikes failed and
1,836 people died.
a $19.5 billion plan to defend New York City
against rising seas. “Sandy was a temporary set-
back that can ultimately propel us forward,” he
said. The mayor’s proposal calls for the construc-
tion of levees, local storm-surge barriers, sand
dunes, oyster reefs, and more than 200 other
measures. It goes far beyond anything planned
by any other American city. But the mayor dis-
missed the idea of a harbor barrier. “A giant
barrier across our harbor is neither practical
nor affordable,” Bloomberg said. The plan notes
that since a barrier would remain open most of
the time, it would not protect the city from the
inch-by-inch creep of sea-level rise.
Meanwhile, development in the city’s flood
zones continues. Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at
Columbia University, says the entire New York